By Santosh Digal, BosNewsLife Asia Correspondent
KANDHAMAL, INDIA (BosNewsLife)– Survivors of India’s worst anti-Christian violence in recent memory have met European Union delegates over the weekend, urging the officials to help them fight for justice.
EU diplomats appeared visibly moved when visiting displaced refugees in the troubled Indian state of Orissa where they saw old and sick men and infants born in refugee camps that were set up after violence killed over 100 people since Christmas 2007.
Most bloodshed rocked the region in August, 2008, as Hindu mobs in Orissa’s Kandhamal District attacked churches and Christian homes. The violence broke out after the killing of a Hindu leader. Although Maoist fighters reportedly claimed responsibility, Hindus blamed Christians.
The Survivors Association of Kandhamal Communal Violence handed over a memorandum to the EU delegation saying “Homeless and in agony, we still welcome you to our beautiful Kandhamal, where we have lived generations upon generations since history began for us.”
“We hope,” the statement said, that “your short visit to Kandhamal will help you see for yourself not just the condition in which many of our brothers and sisters live [but also] our sorrow and our pain invisible and unfelt to the outside world.”
HOMES DESTROYED
Some 5347 houses were “looted and destroyed by fire, many women and girls were raped, and more than 75 people were murdered” in the August-related clashes alone, the group explained.
Many were killed, it said, in “the name of religion and ethnicity. Large-scale displacement and migrations followed with over 50,000 people becoming refugees in their own motherland.”
However relative few arrests have been made. “The culprits of this inhuman activity are roaming freely, neither arrested nor punished,” the group stressed. “We are deeply concerned about the high rate of acquittals in the fast track courts,” added Archbishop Raphael Cheenath.
He said Christian leaders are “demanding [the creation of] a Special Investigation Team to investigate every case of murder and arson. Similarly, there is also need for transferring the cases against politically powerful persons.”
Christians are a minority in this mainly Hindu nation of over 1 billion people, but there have been reports of growing tensions as Hindu militants oppose the spread of Christianity in especially rural areas of the country.
How sad that this most horrible violence and abusive atrocities were committed repeatedly in India by Hindu terrorists. But so very little was in the news, few know about these other terrorists, who repeatedly abuse non-Hindus in India. WHY? Due in large part to their violent and vicious self-centered nationalistic cult of Hindutva, the false belief that India is for Hindus only. But even Christians have lived in India for 2,000 years! Gandhi Ji helped make India a secular democracy. It must be made and kept that way. But Indian Govt and police are such weaklings, failing to protect minorities or to prosecute these terrorists. U must punish and take care of them, since terrorists in India are not just radical Muslim attackers.
UR responsible to prosecute and stop them now, in the name of God!